Midi-Controlled Electricity

Midi-Controlled Electricity

Midilightning

I finally gave in and decided to post footage of me testing my OMG super secret musical DRSSTC. I designed it last year as a paid commission for a Danish arts group who wanted a chorus of six musical coils that could be played by MIDI. I made a single prototype to test it here, but they ran six coils together in the final system, built by Finn Hammer over in Denmark.

http://scopeboy.com/tesla/finns/musical_test_raw.mpg

http://scopeboy.com/tesla/finns/dazed-and-confrazzled.mpg

What I made was an adaptor board that connected the internal tone generators on a Roland JX-8P synth to one or more DRSSTCs. The board converted the volume envelope to burst length, so the harder you pounded the keys, the bigger the sparks got. Hitting a high pitched note hard would blow the fuses, and the MIDI arrangements had to take this into account.

[Via] [Scopeboy] [Finn Hammer]

7 thoughts on “Midi-Controlled Electricity

  1. UncleClive says:

    You should have a go at making the structure of the keyboard from Polymorph plastic.
    It’s a re-mouldable plastic that can be moulded by hand once heated in hot water. When cooled it’s extremeley hard and durable

    Maplin Electronics in te UK and varoius others carry it

    http://tinyurl.com/kwfv7

  2. pelrun says:

    If you read the linked page, Russ mentions attempting to use Shapelock for one of his prototypes – and failing miserably.

    From my own experiments with the stuff I can agree – it’s truly wonderous stuff, but it has it’s limitations.

  3. RussNelson says:

    I want to be able to manufacture this keyboard in the hundreds of units, so I’m looking for something reasonably repeatable. Shapelock (I assume similar to Polymorph) is great for one-off stuff like a cellphone cradle for cellphones lacking cradles, but it’s not good at all for production stuff.

  4. nitr0burn says:

    looks like a hand cramp waiting to happen.

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